I’m some­times asked if my nov­el, A Reunion of Ghosts, is auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. The first time I heard this ques­tion I was tak­en aback. A Reunion of Ghosts is essen­tial­ly a long sui­cide note writ­ten by three unhap­py sis­ters whose fam­i­ly lega­cy has left them with a shared bur­den of shame and guilt. Delph, the youngest sis­ter, believes they are being vis­it­ed by the sins of their great grand­fa­ther — a chemist who devel­oped and per­son­al­ly deployed the first poi­son gas­es used in war. Lady and Vee, the two old­er sis­ters, don’t believe that they’re cursed, exact­ly, but they sure don’t think that they’re blessed. The sis­ters are often wit­ty and droll — dark humor is their sav­ing grace — but they have drea­ry jobs and drink­ing prob­lems and no real friends and zero love lives and poor Vee has can­cer and… well, things are just not going well.

So what, then, I won­der, are peo­ple ask­ing when they want to know if this book is auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal? Are they inquir­ing as to whether I, too, am chron­i­cal­ly mis­er­able and alco­holic and sui­ci­dal? For the record, my answer is: Unless I am being forced to watch a sport­ing event on TV, no. None of the char­ac­ters in A Reunion of Ghosts are inspired by my own life or even by peo­ple I know or have known.

And yet, I have to admit I’ve put parts of me into those sis­ters. The sis­ters and I are sim­i­lar in age. They live in a part of New York City where I once lived. They go to the col­lege I attend­ed. Lady has the same wood­en dish­es that were my first set of dish­es, both of us fig­ur­ing we’d have them for­ev­er because they’d nev­er break. Nei­ther of us had con­sid­ered the splin­ter problem.

In terms of per­son­al­i­ty and behav­ior, the sis­ters and I share oth­er attrib­ut­es. Like me, they crack jokes in the midst of dark times. Like me, they are intro­vert­ed and once they’re home, they have a hard time going out again. Also we share an obses­sion with cer­tain Ger­man-Jew­ish chemists cir­ca World War I.

This is the way nov­els come to life. The nov­el­ist imbues her char­ac­ters and their envi­rons with all sorts of bor­rowed flot­sam and jet­sam from real life. Some of these details are small — a pho­to­graph of a dog attend­ing a wed­ding that the author once saw — and some are large — the author is diag­nosed with can­cer (she is fine now) and decides to share the ill­ness with a char­ac­ter. That doesn’t mean the char­ac­ter is the author in any tru­ly mean­ing­ful way. For the author, her own can­cer is a dis­turb­ing real­i­ty, but her character’s can­cer is metaphor.

And yet, even while I demur at the sug­ges­tion that I’m writ­ing some sort of thin­ly-dis­guised mem­oir, I do under­stand the impulse to ask if a work of fic­tion is auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal even when it seems abun­dant­ly clear that it isn’t. The author may not have expe­ri­enced the spe­cif­ic events she writes about; she may not have had her heart bro­ken in the same exact way as a char­ac­ter has; she may nev­er have been aban­doned by a par­ent; she may even be mer­ri­ly writ­ing about chemists with­out hav­ing tak­en a chem­istry course in her life. But if she’s going to breathe life into her char­ac­ters, she has to find a way slip into their skins and see the world through their eyes. That calls for an act of the imag­i­na­tion. Fic­tion, of course, is such an act. But so is empa­thy such an act. For me, writ­ing fic­tion requires empa­thy for every sin­gle char­ac­ter in the book — includ­ing the vil­lains. Espe­cial­ly the vil­lains. In fact, if I’m tru­ly writ­ing empa­thet­i­cal­ly, there are no villains.

I think, then, that when read­ers ask if a sto­ry is auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, what they’re actu­al­ly ask­ing is, How did you man­age to make these char­ac­ters feel whole and com­plex and idio­syn­crat­ic and human? Did you bor­row from your life? Or did you actu­al­ly imag­ine and make a new life?

It’s a won­der­ful ques­tion when you think of it that way. It’s a reminder that nov­el­ists, in writ­ing about peo­ple who are not like them­selves, can per­suade read­ers to care about peo­ple who are not like themselves. Our fic­tion­al char­ac­ters exist not because they are us, but because they are born of our under­stand­ing of the human con­di­tion with all its sor­rows and joys and irra­tional­i­ties. In that way, then, these char­ac­ters do come from a deeply per­son­al part of the author. In that way, per­haps all nov­els are autobiographical.

A grad­u­ate of the Iowa Writ­ers Work­shop, Judith Claire Mitchell has received fel­low­ships from the James Michener/​Copernicus Soci­ety, the Wis­con­sin Insti­tute for Cre­ative Writ­ing, the Arts Insti­tute of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, and else­where. She cur­rent­ly lives in Madi­son with her hus­band, the artist Don Friedlich.

Ear­li­er this week, Judith Claire Mitchell wrote about her two decades liv­ing in the Mid­west as a pass­ing” Jew. The author of A Reunion of Ghosts and The Last Day of the War, Judith is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Madi­son where she directs the MFA Pro­gram in Cre­ative Writ­ing. She is blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series.

Judith Claire Mitchell is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Madi­son, where she directs the MFA Pro­gram in Cre­ative Writ­ing. A grad­u­ate of the Iowa Writ­ers Work­shop, Mitchell has received fel­low­ships from the James Michener/​Copernicus Soci­ety, the Wis­con­sin Insti­tute for Cre­ative Writ­ing, the Arts Insti­tute of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, and else­where. She cur­rent­ly lives in Madi­son with her hus­band, artist Don Friedlich.